


A Panoply of Souls

by Lomonaaeren



Series: Cloak and Dagger [17]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-16
Updated: 2015-09-16
Packaged: 2018-04-21 00:51:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4808654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the confrontation at the Ministry, worlds go on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Panoply of Souls

**Author's Note:**

> This is the last one-shot, and the last story, in the Cloak and Dagger series. Read the other stories before this one.

"And it is the judgment of the Wizengamot that, for experimenting with Dark magic and placing the lives of innocents in jeopardy, you will be sentenced to six years in Azakban..."  
  
The bowed head of the Auror they were watching be sentenced right now should have been enough to content Hermione, but she found herself munching her hair in agitation again. How could this  _make up_ for the scenes she'd watched, over and over again in memories, of people being turned into twisted? And then the Ministry had set things up so their mistakes would be killed, instead of getting the treatment they needed to bring back their minds and sanity.  
  
"Are you all right?" Ron, seated beside her in the witnesses' gallery of this courtroom, whispered as he leaned towards her.  
  
"I'm fine," Hermione said, and frowned at him, because he continued to look concerned in the exact same way. "But all I can think of is the people who  _aren't_ fine."  
  
Ron's hand found and squeezed hers. "Some of them are going to be fine," he said quietly. "That potion that Malfoy started working on and the other Potions masters improved? It's finally out of trials now. They can test it on twisted they've captured and see how long it brings back their sanity. Then they can improve it further."  
  
Hermione shoved him in the shoulder. It only irritated her a little, after so many years, that he was big enough she couldn't move him easily. "You should have told me the minute you found out!"  
  
Ron rolled his eyes. "I did try to tell you. At breakfast this morning, remember? But you said you were too nervous to think about anything except the trial."  
  
Hermione sniffed and faced the floor of the courtroom again as another criminal, an Unspeakable this time, was brought forwards. Hermione smiled. She recognized his face as one of the people who had kept insisting that they were innocent because of blood politics, because they had made the twisted at first as weapons to "defend" pure-blood culture. She would be glad to see him sentenced, as there was no doubt he would be.  
  
"It is the judgment of the Wizengamot that you, for crimes involving Dark magic and the corruption of innocents, will be sentenced to ten years in Azkaban..."  
  
"Sometimes I wonder what you care about more," Ron murmured beside her, "seeing the guilty ones punished or helping the survivors."  
  
Hermione turned and glared at him. "The answer is always  _both_. You know that, Ron Weasley."  
  
Ron smiled at her, the smile that softened his whole face and was one of the major reasons that Hermione had fallen in love with him. "Yes. When you put it like that, I know the answer."  
  
"So right now, I'm thinking about the people who are getting punished," Hermione concluded, turning around again as yet another Auror get hauled forwards, "and tomorrow I'll think about the innocents who got hurt."  
  
"Yes, dear," said Ron meekly.  
  
Hermione reached back and squeezed his hand in return. It had taken months of testimony and fighting and Pensieve memories and bringing in people who needed the potion to make them sane and able to talk about the experiments performed on them, but they had managed it, at last.  
  
Her only regret was that Harry wasn't here to share in the triumph.  
  
*  
  
"I want you to think about this and be very sure that you're doing the right thing."  
  
Thomasina bowed her head. She had to regard her hands, and then her neatly packed trunk, and then her wand, and none of them helped. She still started to shake with laughter, and Simone's neatly-fired curse nearly hit her.  
  
"I don't see why  _everything_ I do is funny." Simone folded her arms and scowled at Thomasina, who at least was able to use  _that_ to recover herself. Simone scowling was very much business as usual.  
  
"It's funny to hear you talking about the right thing," Thomasina said patiently.  
  
"I'll have you know that I believed in doing the right thing when I first became Auror Jenkins." Simone dramatically put her hand over her heart. "For at least  _five_ whole minutes, I believed that load of bollocks they handed out in training about how Aurors were the guardians of the moral truth and the right way to live."  
  
"Five minutes is a record for you," Thomasina admitted. "But you always cared more about being an Auror than I did. So you should ask  _yourself_ if you're doing the right thing."  
  
"Why ask questions you already know the answer to?" Simone idly spun her wand. "It's me, ergo I am doing the right thing." She looked Thomasina in the eye. "And you'll miss it more than you're showing."  
  
"Of course I will," said Thomasina softly, looking around the Socrates Corps office. It was full of ghosts if she listened for their laughter. Eric Latham, the Socrates Auror who had insisted that he didn't need a partner, complaining about how hot his tea was. Potter and Malfoy, conducting the most badly-hidden office romance in the history of office romances. Thomasina hadn't known  _who_ they thought they were fooling, but they were bad at it no matter what.  
  
"I wonder if we should have stayed, after all," said Simone, pulling one of those faces that was only regretful if you didn't know her. "We might be giving too much aid and comfort to the enemy by quitting."  
  
"We are  _resigning_ ," Thomasina pointed out haughtily. "That means that we're giving aid and comfort to ourselves, and terror to the enemy, because they don't know where we're going to go next."  
  
Simone had never been good at seriousness, at least outside of cases where they were actually facing murder or investigating one. Her mouth quivered, and then she came over and put her hands on either side of Thomasina's neck, holding her still. "As long as you're content with it, then I am," she said.  
  
Thomasina covered her hand with one of hers and kissed her on the cheek. "I am. We can set our own prices for the kind of investigative work you want to do, anyway. Two former Aurors, trained, with the mystique of associating with Potter and Malfoy? They'll be falling over themselves to hire us."  
  
Simone smiled at her, and they departed arm-in-arm.  
  
*  
  
Ginny hesitated, and then locked the door behind her with a bob of her head and a good twist of the key.  
  
It was ridiculous, maybe. No one had come knocking on her door to ask her anything about her involvement in Ernhardt's supposed death, when he had possessed her, even with all the testimony and the investigations into Auror and Unspeakable corruption in the Ministry in recent months. There was no sign that Harry had ever betrayed her, with what little he knew about her past when she'd briefly been a criminal, or associated with criminals, or whatever term you wanted to use for it.  
  
But Ginny didn't want to stay in England anyway. She wanted to go somewhere else, somewhere she wouldn't feel the compulsion to constantly look over her shoulder, or wonder whether the casual questions her family was asking her had some kind of dark edge to them.   
  
She would go to France. That was partially because Michael had been there at one point, and if he had been a source of some of her problems...well, some of the happiest months of her life had been spent with him. Maybe she would look him up and see what she could do as far as helping him straighten his life out, if he was still in trouble.  
  
And it was partially because Harry and Malfoy had gone to Spain, and this way, she knew that they wouldn't run into her.  
  
She didn't want to see them again.  
  
Ginny Summoned her broom. She would Apparate to Ron and Hermione's house to drop the key off--rather than burning all her bridges, she would leave a path open if someday, she  _wanted_ to return--but then she would fly across the Channel. She was rather looking forward to the sight of water and the wind in her face.  
  
If that was similar in some respects to the journey Hermione had told her about Harry and Malfoy taking, well. No one could prove it, and no one else ever had to know.  
  
*  
  
"Do you ever have the feeling that something is missing?"  
  
Narcissa folded her newspaper down on the table. She smoothed the creases flat, into the most precise edges she could, to hide the way her hands trembled and give herself a moment to respond.  
  
 _Thank Merlin that he brought it up, so that I didn't have to and seem mad if I did._  
  
"Sometimes," she responded, finally lifting her eyes to meet her husband's across the table. Lucius was frowning at her from behind his cup of tea, but not in the way that would suggest he felt all of this was crazy and should not be discussed. That meant she could proceed. "As if we had forgotten something important, as if something that mattered was taken out of our lives."  
  
"Indeed." Lucius sighed and placed his cup on the table. "And yet, we should not feel that way, with the news you told me yesterday."  
  
This time, Narcissa knew her smile was more genuine, and she let her hand linger on her belly. There was nothing to see yet, but she was a witch. She had all the spells and the Potions knowledge she wanted that would tell her she was not going to bleed for nine months now.   
  
"If anything, perhaps the joy of that news, of the Malfoy line continuing, throws this into relief," she said thoughtfully. "I expected to do nothing but celebrate the news of an addition to our family, the heir you have wanted for so long. This is...something else. In the shadow of something else."  
  
"There is no way that someone could have used a Memory Charm on us?" Lucius's voice was neutral, but Narcissa saw the way his fingers curled around his wand, and understood. They had suffered enough oddities in the last few months, during their encounters with Potter and the way that Narcissa's warped Parseltongue gift had almost consumed her life.  
  
"I do not think so," said Narcissa. "This is only a shadow. And how could someone have used a Memory Charm on us both at once? We have never both gone outside the Manor's protections except during the time we captured Potter, which I recall perfectly, and the time we went to meet Potter and his friend, and there are no memory gaps in either of those incidents for me."  
  
Lucius slowly shook his head. "Nor for me."  
  
He fell silent, pondering as much as she did, Narcissa was sure. The Manor's wards would protect them against Memory Charms being cast on them in any room or on the grounds, and the odds were high against both of them being charmed at the same time even if they  _had_ left more often together.  
  
She sighed. That sense of a shadow had hung over her for a long time now, and she had not been able to shed it, not with joy, not with sorrow, not with the insanity that had haunted her mind for weeks when she was succumbing to the botched results of the Ministry's experiment on her. Perhaps it was time to forget it and move on.  
  
She reached across the table to take her husband's hand. Lucius looked at her with the slightest movement of his head to the side, tilt-headed and impassive-eyed as a hawk.  
  
"Please," Narcissa said quietly. "I would prefer that we let it go rather than tearing ourselves apart searching for the cause. We have something now we've lacked for decades. Perhaps that is enough to make up for whatever else it is, when we don't even know what it is."  
  
"We have hardly begun to tear ourselves apart," Lucius began, a different kind of shadow darkening his face.  
  
Narcissa knew that he hated to leave a mystery like this unsolved. She squeezed his hand anyway and shook her head. "Will you please let it go? For me? I know that you could make it an investigation, and you might even figure out what's wrong. But I would prefer that you let it go."  
  
She could see the thoughts running behind Lucius's eyes. He frowned until she was sure he would say no, and she prepared to let his hand go and leave the room. She might understand the tenacity that would keep him clinging to the trail of a solution, but she refused to support it.  
  
And then Lucius sighed, and gripped her hands, and smiled at her. "For your sake, Narcissa," he murmured. "For the sake of my wife, and the woman I love, and the mother of my son." His grip tightened again.  
  
Narcissa let herself be guided up and around the table and kissed, while her eyes shut. She was glad that they had shut, because a different kind of disquiet had woken in her at his last words. It seemed to her that he had said them once before, and with even more joy and force.  
  
But she had never been pregnant before, even when she desperately tried. She had not had even the slightest notion that she was. That meant that she must be imagining it, or remembering it from dreams, or else recalling it from some other occasion, early on in their marriage, when Lucius had said she  _would be_  the mother of his son, rather than implying that she was in the throes of being so right now.  
  
Narcissa turned her face into his kiss, and let herself forget.  
  
*  
  
"I don't suppose you would consider making  _this_ our permanent home?"  
  
"Too small," Draco said, but there was a laziness to the drawl in his voice that Harry hadn't heard before when they were comparing other houses. He held back his grin and leaned against the wall next to the stairs, folding his arms.  
  
He and Draco had been to Altamira, the cave with ancient paintings that had been largely closed to the Muggle public for a few decades. Draco, of course, knew people who knew people who knew people, or knew the universal pure-blood code for "a way that wizards can get into the cave without damaging it, and Muggles can fuck off." They'd used charms to prevent their footsteps or their breathing from damaging the paintings, and had generally enjoyed themselves.  
  
Harry  _did_ suspect that part of Draco's enjoyment came from being invited to a party in the mansion of one of the Spanish wizards they'd met immediately afterwards, where the atmosphere was a babble of translation charms and talk about politics that Harry paid no attention to. He'd found a group of enthusiastic Quidditch fans, and that was enough for him to enjoy the evening.  
  
And then someone had mentioned the next morning, in Draco's hearing, that there was an empty house in the wizarding enclave around the mansion, and they had gone to take a look at it.  
  
Harry tilted his head back to consider the arching ceiling, raised above the entrance hall on pillars decorated with swirls and curves that he thought were Moorish. He had liked it immediately, especially because, despite the high ceilings, this really was a  _house_ and not a mansion. It had some large rooms, but not many, and there was a kitchen and a bathroom on the ground floor, and a paved courtyard with a garden Harry could imagine working in.  
  
Harry could see himself living here. He had to admit that Draco was probably the one who would have to make most of the final decisions, because it was still a larger house than Harry had ever lived in, but at least Harry thought they could be happy. He drifted out to look at the garden again--mostly rocks right now, with a few faded yellow flowers that twined around the stones--and waited for Draco to make up his mind.  
  
*  
  
Draco jerked his head around when he heard the outer door shut. Then he snorted.  _Harry's gone to look at the garden again. God knows that he deserves to have one, after so long in houses not his own._  
  
And in the meantime...  
  
Draco wandered through the rooms upstairs. Mostly, they were built of stone, with here and there a touch of tiles or paneling in what Draco recognized as ridiculously expensive woods, although now they were cracked and rotten. He let his hand rest on the arch of a doorway and felt the sturdiness of the stone beneath all the ornate decoration, though. This was a place that needed upkeep, someone to dig in and be committed to refurbishing it.  
  
He thought he could be that person, as long as Harry was by his side.  
  
The rooms didn't circle a central one, but opened into each other in what seemed to be a loose spiral, until they reached a second staircase on the other side of the house. Draco wandered through, blinking at sudden bursts of sunlight as he reached windows without panes or shutters. Through one, he also caught movement, and looked out, wondering if he would see a bird on a nest or something similar.  
  
Then he realized its prospect was the garden, and what he had seen was Harry, stooping down to tug a wild weed's roots out of the ground.  
  
Draco exhaled softly, through his nose, and looked around. This wasn't Malfoy Manor. There would be a ridiculous amount of work, and possibly money, to put in before everything could be back to normal.  
  
But lucky for him, since Harry had already chosen the place, they had plenty of both.  
  
*  
  
Harry came back into the house stretching his arms over his head. He'd spent more time than he'd been aware of at first, bending over the flowers in the garden and yanking out the obvious weeds and moving around stones and pondering over others, and his back ached in a way that it hadn't since he'd worked in the garden at the Dursleys'.  
  
"We're buying it, aren't we?"  
  
Harry blinked and looked up. Draco stood on the top of the staircase, shaking his head. Harry came up to him and picked up his hand, kissing the back of it.  
  
"I'd like to," he said. "But you matter more to me than any house could. If you don't like it, then we'll go somewhere else."  
  
Draco frowned at the walls, but Harry had learned to recognize the way his eyes looked when he was seriously considering something, as opposed to hating it, and he waited patiently.  
  
Draco finally looked back at him and said, "I could learn to like it well enough, I suppose. But it'll take a lot of work, and time."  
  
Harry couldn't help smiling. "Good thing that we both have a lot of that, now, since we've stopped being Aurors."  
  
This time, Harry thought he hadn't been meant to see the smile that broke out on Draco's lips, but he didn't turn away in time to hide it, and Harry caught his hand and turned Draco back to face him, lifting a hand to his cheek.  
  
"What do you think?" Harry asked softly.  
  
And Draco leaned forwards and kissed him, by way of an answer, and Harry put his arms around him, and they stood there, kissing, in that place of stone and light.  
  
 **The End.**


End file.
